Jew Store

by Suberman ,Stella

  The aunts were leaving, we all knew that. Though most of us were going to at least miss Aunt Hannah, my father was not going to miss either one of them.

  Even my mother found it hard to regret Aunt Sadie’s upcoming departure. Most of Sadie’s complaints she could put up with, but on the subject of the bar mitzvah, Sadie had been a “torn” in my mother’s side. Run from Sadie though my mother did, run from herself though my mother did, Aunt Sadie always managed sooner or later to catch up and pile on the guilt. As to Joey already being almost thirteen, the magic age, Aunt Sadie said Joey was a smart boy and with double Hebrew lessons “could do it easy.”

  On this night my mother introduced the bar mitzvah discussion with a reminder to my father that her sisters would be leaving soon. He said he’d try to survive. “But some job I’ll have to live through it.”

  “And Sadie and I have been talking.”

  My father gave my mother one of his fake looks of disbelief. “You and Sadie been talking? Remind me to tell it to the Sentinel.” He took a long, noisy sip of tea. “I ain’t exactly in the mood for no more talking from you and Sadie.” And worse, my father knew exactly what was on my mother’s mind.

  My mother tried for a way to say it. She started with the thought that there was nothing in Concordia for the children, but she always said she knew immediately it had come out all wrong.

  It certainly sounded all wrong to my father. “Nothing here but family and friends,” he snapped. “Nothing here but what to make them happy.” He was waiting for my mother to say that Joey should go to New York with Sadie. When she didn’t say it, he said it for her. “Is that what you mean, Reba?”

  I held my breath for the answer.

  My mother didn’t say yes or no. She just said it was a chance for Joey to go with somebody looking after him.

  So who had decided that Joey was going in the first place, my father wanted to know. “When did we decide this? Do I remember deciding this?”

  “We all know what has to be,” my mother said to my father.

  My father just turned and yelled for Joey to come into the kitchen. He wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth, as he said, if we all knew it had to be.

  My brother came in. He too knew what it was about.

  Straightaway my father asked, “You want to go to New York and be a bar mitzvah boy, Joey?”

  Joey didn’t say yes or no either. Joey has always said that at that moment he was too full of my father needing him on Saturdays, full of school, full of Concordia. No, he didn’t want to go, he didn’t want to go in the worst way. He said to my father, “Mama wants me to.”

  It sounded awful to my mother. “It ain’t like we want you to go away!” she cried. “We don’t! We don’t!”

  My father would have none of this. He told my mother to tell it right. “And how it is, is you want him to go. Otherwise, why are you making all this fuss? You want him to go, ain’t that right?” My mother couldn’t understand this fine point. Of course she wanted Joey to go, but of course she didn’t want him to go. Why was my father saying it like that?

  My father persisted. “Say it, Reba, say it. Say you want him to go.”

  My mother finally said it. “All right already. I want him to go. He’s a Jewish boy, and a Jewish boy has to have a bar mitzvah.”

  “Tell me, Reba,” my father said, in a very quiet, ominously quiet, voice, “is it right that a bar mitzvah should break a little boy’s heart? And his mother’s and father’s, too?”

  My mother answered that sacrifices had to be made, that they had to be good Jewish parents. She said, “Aaron, don’t you see? We have to do right!”

  “Right by who?”

  “Right by God,” my mother said, as if finally stating a something no one could argue with.

  She reckoned without my father. “What God? Who God?” he cried out to her. “What God do you know? You only know people who say they speak for God. Can’t you see that?”

  My mother was scarcely listening. By now she was only trying to pacify. She already had Joey in cheder. “He’ll be back before you know it,” she said.

  My father knew better. It would be almost a year before Joey would be back, and it would seem a very long time indeed. He glanced over at me. “The little one will have a hard time remembering she’s got a brother by the time he comes back.” He looked at Joey and said, “No, Joey, I don’t have no way to explain. It don’t make no sense to me neither.”

  And, as he pushed himself out from the table, my father was saying, “So that’s how it is. And how it is is how it is.”

  The next day my mother went with my brother to withdraw him from school. I went along. Going to one of the “real” schools was to me an adventure not to be missed.

  “We’ve so enjoyed having Joseph with us,” said Miss Ada, the principal of the sixth-through twelfth-grade school. She could have been a twin to Miss Mattie: hair done up over a similar rat, same protruding shirtfront suffering from starch overload.

  Miss Ada pulled out Joey’s records from a yellow oak file cabinet. “These will show what a good pupil he’s been,” she said as she handed the papers to my mother. She hoped they would take time to appreciate him in “that great big school he’s going to.” “Lord knows,” she said, “he’s been pure inspiration around here.”

  My mother went home with the papers, and Joey and I went around to T’s classroom. We waited in the hall for recess. When the class came out, Joey caught T by the arm and pulled him over to the wall. “Got something to tell you,” he said.

  T wanted to know if Joey wasn’t going to recess.

  “Nope,” Joey answered him, “I’m going to New York.”

  “On a visit?”

  “Nope, I’m going to school there.”

  “You folks moving?”

  “Nope. Only me’s going.”

  T did his thing of flicking his eyes up. “You telling me a story?”

  “Nope, I got to go to study for my bar mitzvah.” Joey has always said that at that moment, he “wished to his soul” (an expression from Concordia that he still uses) that T could go with him. How could he go to the home of “the Broncks” without T?

  T hit the wall softly with his fist, turned back, and said to the air, perhaps to the world, “This is so sorry, there ought to be a law.”

  The records were given to Aunt Sadie. Joey was to live with our grandparents, and Aunt Sadie would enroll him in the nearby public school. “It’s a lovely school with a lovely playground,” she informed him.

  Miriam said Concordia had a lovely school with a lovely playground.

  Aside from hostile exchanges between Miriam and Aunt Sadie, in these last few days there was little else in the way of talk. Aunt Hannah neither asked a question nor answered one. She did her packing by dropping things haphazardly into the Gladstone bag, after which she would sit on the front porch.

  My father was almost as silent, though on one memorable occasion, he lashed out at Aunt Sadie. “Why did we need you anyway?” he asked her. “We had a nice family in a nice little town with a nice business. Who needed you to come here and turn everything into I don’t know what?”

  Though it was obviously a rhetorical question, Aunt Sadie’s lips gathered together, made a little knot in her face, and she said, “I’m only looking out for the family, like always.”

  To which my father replied that so far, with her looking out for the family, everybody was miserable. “Hannah ain’t happy, and ditto for the rest of us.” He gave her a look. “Okay, you win. Pack up your soft-boiled eggs and go on home.”

  My mother, according to my father, was also to blame. “Look what you done, Reba. And for what? For who?” For the first time in my life, I was seeing my father furious with my mother, not joshing her, not teasing her, but mad and meaning it.

  With my father’s anger so intensely upon her, my mother’s already shaky confidence all but collapsed. She was suddenly aware of a longing for bed, for green eyeshades.

  T
he train was an early-morning one. Only my mother and I were with Joey at the depot. My father was not there, no reasons given. He had simply gotten up before sunrise, readied himself for work, and gone silently out the door.

  My sister was not there either. Although her teacher would surely have excused her for such important family business, she had nonetheless grabbed up her satchel and headed off for school, yelling as she went, “Will somebody please explain this to me?” Seth took us to the depot in the wagon.

  Even though I had been to our outdoor depot many times, today everything about it seemed strange. There was no real light, and shadows fell in curious angles.

  My mother was straightening Joey’s collar, fussing with his tie, pushing at his hair. “If you’ve forgotten anything, I’ll send it right away,” she was saying.

  T came into the depot, alone, no Erv. “I had to see for my own self that you was truly going,” he said to Joey. He stubbed hard at the concrete floor with his black hightop shoes. “You coming back?”

  “Sure. Soon’s I finish everything.”

  “Lord, that’s a long time off.”

  In a moment there was the chugging, snorting, and clanging of an arriving train. Then it had stopped and was exhaling giant white puffs. The Negro porter came along and grabbed up all the bags on the platform and swung them into a car. “Whoever belongs to these here bags best come along,” he called out. “This here train’s raring to go, like a hound dog after a rabbit.” I had often heard the porters say exactly this, and I had always laughed, but today it didn’t seem much of a joke.

  Aunt Sadie shouted to Aunt Hannah and Joey, and Aunt Hannah finally moved up the steps, Aunt Sadie shoving from behind.

  Joey wasn’t moving. There was a problem: My mother was holding him around the arms, and I by his legs. He finally wriggled free from my mother’s grasp; I was still wound around.

  He bent down and spoke into my ear. He wanted me to do him a favor. He wanted me to wave goodbye to him like Raggedy Ann. “It’ll make Mama laugh,” he whispered to me.

  I unwound. I put my hand up and let it flop around crazily in a rag doll’s version of a wave. Though it brought no laugh from my mother, I felt entitled to a quid pro quo, and I told Joey he had to bring me back a present.

  Joey agreed. “A sweet to eat and a toy to enjoy. Promise.”

  Aunt Hannah appeared once at the train window, did a small flutter, and went back out of sight. Aunt Sadie gave a few businesslike nods. Joey was leaning out the window waving to us as the train pulled out.

  Afterwards T split off in the direction of school, and my mother and I turned the corner toward the wagon. A plump lady was rounding full tilt from the other side. “Did I miss him?” the lady asked, struggling for breath. It was Miss Brookie.

  My mother nodded.

  Miss Brookie said, “Damn! Double dog damn!” and blamed the stove for making her late. “Wouldn’t you know that on this particular morning, it would decide to take its own sweet time?” She held up a cardboard box. Inside was Joey’s favorite coconut cake. She had wanted to give it to him. “So he won’t forget us,” she said.

  “Forget us?” My mother hurtled into alarm. “Why should he forget us?”

  No doubt sensing that at this moment my mother needed all the support she could get, Miss Brookie showed some signs of softening in her feelings toward her. “Why, I might have sent him to New York, too,” she said to her.

  My mother brightened a bit. “You would? You would have sent him?”

  “Yes, I might have.” But Miss Brookie could reassure no further. Certain principles could not be violated. She plunked the box into my mother’s hands and said, “But, mercy, your reasons and mine? As different as billy goats and bananas.”

  We started on our way again. My mother was now carrying the cardboard box, though it took a moment for her to be conscious of it. Then all at once the presence in her hands of a lard-laden cake, given to her by a lady who chided and scolded her, meant for a son to whom she had just said a tearful goodbye, seemed just one burden too many. She settled the box on top of a nearby ligustrum hedge.

  And the day was not over: At the end of it, there was my father moving out from the bedroom behind the French doors and into Joey’s room. What he told my mother was that he didn’t feel too good about things. “I don’t even feel too good about me,” he said. “Maybe I need to be by myself for a while.”

  At first we all missed Joey very much. We each had our own way of missing him, but we all missed him. Of course, with time these feelings subsided, and it wasn’t long before everything closed over like grass over a bare patch in the earth, though, it must be reported, my father continued to sleep in Joey’s bedroom.

  My memories of Joey were like scenes from old picture shows, and they no doubt receded more quickly for me than for the others. It wasn’t long before I had to work hard to bring him to mind. In short order I couldn’t recall what he looked like; and then I had no memory of his ever having lived with us. As my father had predicted, in a few months, as I was very young, I forgot Joey just about entirely.

  CHAPTER 21

  GENTILES

  Though the passing years were bringing their share of changes, there was one constant: the long, boring Sundays. I had taken Joey’s place in the casino games, but Miriam would play for only a short while before quitting. If we didn’t say as Miriam used to, “I hate Sundays!” the sentiment was there.

  The Rastows were never Sunday visitors anymore, and news of them was scarce. Sammy Levine had nothing to report until one day he told us that Manny had married a local Sidalia girl. My mother used to say that the news was a “lump” in her heart.

  So on the Sunday I saw Seth walking up to the back door (in “good darky” fashion), I thought that here at last was rescue. I anticipated cat’s cradles with the length of wrapping-counter string Seth always carried in his pocket.

  He came onto the little back porch smiling funny. He told me to run fetch my daddy. Nothing else.

  My father came right out, and Seth stood stiffly in his Sunday clothes and said he had something to tell him. “Something mighty important,” Seth said.

  My father went to one of the private jokes he and Seth shared. He said to him, “With all that Jewish blood you got in you, nothing but money can be that important. How much you need?”

  It wasn’t money. It was that he had “done bad.” Mr. Lassiter had told him so. Lassiter, the man who delivered coal.

  “Lassiter? What’s he got to do with the price of eggs?”

  It was not eggs but Seth’s clerking that Lassiter had made his business. He had told Seth that clerking was not for niggers, even if they only sold to niggers. “He say I dassent sell at Bronson’s no more,” Seth told my father.

  My father immediately pinned it on the Ku Klux Klan. Seth’s news had caught him off guard, as he had somehow managed to forget about the Klan.

  Trying to project an air of confidence, he managed a little—a very little—smile. “Where is it written that we’re on this earth to keep Everett Lassiter happy?”

  Seth confirmed it was the Ku Klux Klan. He pronounced the first word “Klu,” as did the rest of Concordia, black and white. There had, Seth said, been talk of marching. “It mean a cross-burning for sure. Maybe worse.”

  My father could not allow himself to think what “worse” could mean. What he could think was that this all came from Vedra Broome. She had been unhappy when Seth had been put on commission, and this was the result. “I think I got the picture,” my father said to Seth. “You leave it to me.”

  When my father told my mother, he said, “I ought to fire Vedra so fast her curls would open up.”

  But it wasn’t that easy. First of all, my father didn’t believe in an eye for an eye. “You do that,” he once said to me, “and pretty soon you got a town full of blind people.” Anyway, firing Vedra had to be weighed: It was not something you could do without considering ramifications. It was Seth who would have to go. He c
ould not even go back to old handyman’s job, not with Vedra in the store.

  My father felt responsible for finding something for Seth to do, and, as usual, he wandered over to his regular post for problem solving, the window that overlooked the sward of grass between our house and the Overbys’ about thirty feet away. He gave some thought to talking to somebody high up in the Klan, reasoning with that person, maybe even buttering him up. He decided against it. What that man needed was not a false kiss but an honest slap, and he was in no position to deliver it.

  As he stood there gazing absently, he ran through Seth-type job possibilities. He had about exhausted them when the Studebaker swam into his line of vision.

  He stared at the car, fast turning into a heap of rusting metal since Joey had left. My father had not followed through on his vow, after Joey’s departure, to learn to drive. Whether he had declined to learn because cars had a lot of mechanical failures and it was necessary to be able to do some repair work at home—something, my father thought, that was definitely for Gentiles (my brother’s affinity for car repair was considered aberrational)—or because cars were becoming associated with traveling salesmen, it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was both reasons. At any rate, the car had become useless.

  He watched a bird fly into an opening in one of the isinglass windows where a snap had given way. “The world’s most expensive birdhouse” was the way he always described the car as he saw it at that moment. Still, it gave him an idea: Seth would be a chauffeur. “I guess that’s nigger work, ain’t it?” he said to my mother.

  My mother praised him for working something out.

  “Didn’t take much brains,” my father answered her.

  Recalling an old saying of her mother’s, my mother said to my father, “The highest wisdom is kindness.”

  “Ah, I did only what I had to.”

  “No, you didn’t had to. But you did,” my mother persisted. She spoke to her invisible third person. “That’s because not everybody’s a mensch like my husband, you can’t tell me no.”